Goossips SEO: Disavow, Legal Pages, Googlebot Previews

No need to disavow toxic links

On Bluesky, John Mueller from Google strongly advises SEO professionals not to waste time disavowing so-called "toxic" links. He even goes so far as to call this practice a "waste of money."

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Google, and more specifically John Mueller, has repeatedly said that link disavowal is no longer necessary and can even be counterproductive. Yet many tools, like SEMRush, continue to label links as toxic. That obviously doesn’t help professionals relax on the subject!

Goossip #2

It's better to keep legal pages indexable

John Mueller says it’s unnecessary to block indexing of legal pages (legal notices, privacy policy). These pages don’t create duplicate content issues and are unlikely to affect AdSense approval. Although it’s not a major issue, Mueller recommends leaving these pages indexable.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

If the risk posed by duplicate content is in question, remember that most sites have these kinds of pages. In principle, Google should be perfectly capable of distinguishing them from other site pages.

Goossip #3

Googlebot screenshots can have anomalies

On Reddit, John Mueller clarified a point about the reliability of Googlebot screenshots, which show how the search engine "sees" a web page. Using the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, it is indeed possible to view the rendering of a page as Google perceives it (including JavaScript, CSS and images). Mueller notes that while this representation is generally accurate, it can be affected by "temporal anomalies," meaning temporary issues during a crawl that can impact the page rendering.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Although very handy, Google’s inspection tool is of course not free from flaws and inaccuracies. Hence the importance of not panicking if you see an unusual preview!